羅蘭巴特(Roland Barthes)，二十世紀法國思想家，以符號/結構的觀點批判社會現象，深具影響力。本文整理其代表作「艾菲爾鐵塔及其它迷思」 (The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)中的精彩論點，以茲反省時下的文化相貌。
Bourgeois Mentality
1. 量化心態
Nothing is achieved without an equal consequence; every human action is rigorously countered, recouped. A whole mathematics of the equation reassures the petit bourgeois, making him a world to the measure of his dealings (51). In short, the bourgeois ideology is that of equality: an eye for an eye, effect vs. cause, merchant vs. money, penny for penny(52).
2. 因果邏輯觀
The basis of petit-bourgeois logic—this class has a tyrannical, infinitely sensitive notion of causality: the basis of its morality is not magical at all, but rational. Only, it is a linear, narrow rationality based on a virtually numerical correspondence of causes and effects (100)
3. 溫和理性之道德觀/同質化/普遍性
Good sense is the watchdog of petit-bourgeois equations: it blocks up any dialectical outlets and defines a homogeneous world in which we are sheltered from the disturbances and the leaks of “dreams” (53).
a. 道德之自然性
The bourgeois language dates from the Restoration. It was the period when the bourgeoisie operated a kind of crasis between Morality and Nature, giving the one the protection of the other: fearing they would have to naturalize morality, they moralized Nature, pretended to identify the political and the natural order, and ended by declaring immoral everything which contested the structural laws of the society they were determined to defend. Ex. To strike is to defy the world, to attack the philosophic basis of bourgeois society, that mixture of morality and logic which is good sense. (99)
b. 去異質化
The whole petit-bourgeois mythology implies the refusal of alterity, the negation of the different, the euphoria of identity, and the exaltation of “kind.” This equational reduction of the world prepares an expansionist phase in which the “identity” of human phenomena quickly establishes a “nature” and thereupon a “universality” (53).
c. 個人主義的加持
Individualism is a bourgeois myth which allows us to vaccinate the order and tyranny of class with a harmless freedom. Even if the Russian people is saved, it is as the reflection of French liberties. It is only when it has been illumined by the sun of capitalist civilization that the Russian people can be recognized as spontaneous, affable, generous. Then there will be advantages in revealing its overflowing kindness: which always signifies a deficiency of the Soviet regime, a plentitude of Western happiness. The trip of USSR serves to establish the bourgeois honors of Western civilization.
Manifestations of Bourgeois Mentality
I. 建築高塔之意識形態: 詮釋歷史之幸福感
Architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience (6).
Babel complex: Babel was supposed to serve to communicate with God, and yet Babel is a dream which touches much greater depths than that of the theological project (7)
Panorama is an image we attempt to decipher, in which we try to recognize known sites, to identify landmarks. Panoramic vision has a complex and dialectical nature:
1) euphoric vision: the entire length of a continuous image, perceived in the distance in the bliss of altitude
2)this very continuity engaged the mind in a certain struggle, it seeks to be deciphered, we must find signs within it, a familiarity proceeding from history and from myth; this is why a panorama can never be consumed as a work of art, the aesthetic interest of a painting ceasing once we try to recognize in it particular points derived from our knowledge (10).
To perceive Paris from above is infallibly to imagine a history; from the top of the Tower, the mind finds itself dreaming of the mutation of the landscape which it has before its eyes; through the astonishment of space, it plunges into the mystery of time, lets itself be affected by a kind of spontaneous anamnesis: it is duration itself which becomes panoramic (11)
II. 觀光客心態: 探索即象徵性的占有
For the tourist, every object is first of all an inside, for there is no visit without the exploration of an enclosed space; to visit a church, museum, palace is first of all to shut oneself up, to “make the rounds” of an interior, a little in the manner of an owner: every exploration is an ppropriation. Ex. The monument is a riddle, to enter it is to solve, to possess it (14)
III. 心理學對司法的衝擊:罪犯須承擔可被解釋的一切罪行
It is psychiatry which defends the notion of a absolute self-control, and leaves the criminal his guilt, even beyond the limits of reason. Justice establishes the crime on the cause and thus leaves room for the possibility of madness; whereas psychiatry seems to want to postpone the definition of madness as long as possible.
Confronting a Justice born in the bourgeois era, trained to rationalize the world by reaction against divine or monarchic arbitrary action, psychiatry revives the very old notion of a responsible perversion, whose condemnation must be indifferent to any effort of explanation. (69)
IV. 天才: 資本主義重效率的縮影
Genius is a way of gaining time, of doing at eight what we normally do at twenty-five. A simple question of temporal quantity: a matter of going a little faster than everyone else. Childhood therefore becomes the privileged site of genius.(114)
This miracle is nothing other than a premature accession to the adult’s powers. (115). The entirely bourgeois notion of the child prodigy: an admirable object insofar as it fulfills the ideal function of all capitalist activity: to gain time, to reduce human duration to a numerative problem of precious moments (115)
V. 音樂廳: 中產階結都市化及清教徒勞動觀之結合體
The body is objectivized gently: it is not a hard object catapulted through the air as in pure acrobatics, but rather a soft and dense substance, responsive to very slight movements. The music hall is the aesthetic form of work. Here each number is presented either as the exercise or as the product of labor (124). It is human work memorialized and sublimated; danger and effort are signified at the same time they are subsumed by laughter or by grace (125).
All this muscular magic of the music hall is essentially urban: it is no accident that it is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, born in the world of abrupt urban concentrations and the great Protestant myths of labor (125)
The city rejects the notion of a formless nature, it reduces space to a continuity of solid shiny objects, products to which the artist’s action gives the glamorous status of a quite human thought: work (125).
VI. 對知識分子的敵視
Having left behind the healthy limits of quantification, knowledge is discredited insofar as it can no longer be defined as work. A theme dear to all strong regimes: the identification of intellectuality with idleness; the intellectual is by definition lazy. (129)
This qualification of labor involves, naturally, a promotion of physical strength, that of the muscles; conversely, the head is a suspect site insofar as its products are qualitative, not quantitative (130).
According to a familiar crasis, physical plenitude establishes a kind of moral clarity: only the strong can be frank. The essence common to all these powers is virility, for which the moral substitute is “character,” a rival of the intelligence (131).
It is through his corporeal mediocrity that the intellectual is condemned. Sheltering in the hypertrophy of a fragile and useless head, the entire intellectual being is stricken by the gravest of physical flaws, fatigue (corporeal substitute for decadence) (132)
VII. 餐車:空間的征服
Each constraint seems to produce its contrary freedom, each gesture is a denial of its original limits. Ex. The very lack of room engenders a great deal of napery. Many covers signify that neither space nor time were in short supply for storing and washing them (141).
The menu obeys the law of overnomination which defines luxury cuisine; the dishes have names all the more glamorous in that they emerge from an invisible galley, accompany suburbs and shipping stations; this is the triumph of freedom over necessity (142).
The meal is merely a series of discontinuous takes: we ingest, we wait, like ruminants in their stalls, passively fed according to a series of mouthfuls which sweating keepers busily and fairly distribute down a long service corridor. The process is an inflexible one, so that this whole décor of leisure ends by manifesting what it graciously claimed to sublimate: the methodical filling of stomachs (143)
By food, we participate in a transported immobility. Thus each time man constructs his displacement, it is to give the superstructure of a house; each time he detaches himself from the ground, he requires its guarantee: all the arts of travel have for their goal the very illusion of immobility (144).
VIII. 賢妻良母的神聖性
Work at home preserves the couple, appears to emancipate the wife, to grant her the masculine privilege of earning, without having to abandon her pots and her laundry, what is nobly called the hearth. This bourgeois ideology gives charity the aspect of labor, saving both our soul and the laws of economics; alms sublimates work, work sublimates alms; in short we kill two birds with one stone, which is the golden rule of a bookkeeping civilization (147)
IX. 紐約之城市規劃: 個人掌控空間
The purpose of the numbered streets, distributed according to regular distances: not to make the city into a huge machine and man into an automaton, but to master the distances and orientations by the mind, to put at one man’s disposal the space of these twelve million. This is the purpose of this city’s geometry: that each individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the world (151).
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